The present invention relates to point-of-sale terminals.
Many businesses employ cashiers that interact with customers and handle transactions with customers. Cashiers are often directed as part of their employment to engage in various types of dialog with customers. For example, a cashier may greet a customer, verify what the customer has ordered by reading the order back to him, inquire as to whether the customer is satisfied and provide other verbal (spoken) messages to the customer. Such verbal messages are typically intended to increase customer satisfaction and/or sales.
In many business environments, an important function of a cashier is to provide verbal messages which are offers that the customer may accept or reject, such as an offer for an item the customer has not ordered. One type of offering system is a computer-determined xe2x80x9csuggestive sellxe2x80x9d. U.S. Pat. No. 5,353,219 describes a system for selecting items that a cashier may suggest for a customer to purchase at conventional item prices. Providing offers can increase sales and thereby increase the average profit gained per transaction. In particular, if more offers are provided, the average number of acceptances of such offers will be greater.
Although the business benefits if the cashier provides the proper verbal messages to customers, the cashier typically has little incentive to do so. Accordingly, the cashier will typically provide the proper verbal messages inconsistently or not at all. It is extremely difficult or impossible to assure that the cashier has properly provided an appropriate verbal message for every transaction. For example, in the current environment a manager cannot monitor every transaction of every cashier under his supervision to assure that the cashier makes an offer or otherwise provides the proper verbal message.
It would also be advantageous to determine whether cashiers have appropriately provided verbal messages to customers and to assure that verbal messages were appropriately provided to customers.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for determining whether a verbal message was spoken during a transaction at a POS terminal.
In accordance with the present invention, a point-of-sale terminal initiates a transaction and provides a prompt to be spoken to an operator (e.g. a cashier) of the POS terminal. The prompt indicates a verbal message that is to be spoken by the operator, and may be provided to the operator visually (e.g. displayed text) or aurally (e.g. sound transmitted to headphones). The POS terminal then receives an audio signal via a microphone or similar device to record what the operator has spoken. Using speech recognition, the POS terminal determines whether the audio signal corresponds to the prompt, and thus whether the operator spoke the prompt properly. In one embodiment, the transaction is paused until the operator properly speaks the prompt. In another embodiment, the POS terminal stores an indication of whether the operator has properly spoken the prompt, thereby allowing the performance of the operator to be measured.